Photo: Minnesota Independent

But Rybak’s political gamesmanship — running for re-election as mayor, while coyly hinting at a 2010 bid for the state’s top office — could prove too clever for his own good. Today the state’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board issued a ruling that the Democrat wrongly utilized funds from his mayoral committee to pursue his gubernatorial ambitions.

In particular, the board faulted Rybak’s campaign for a poll commissioned in May that quizzed citizens outside of Minneapolis on questions that clearly seemed designed to test the waters for 2010. The watchdog agency ordered Rybak’s gubernatorial campaign committee to reimburse his mayoral committee $26,500 in order to cover the costs of the poll.

The Republican Party of Minnesota, which initially filed the complaint against Rybak’s campaign with the board, reacted gleefully to the ruling.

“Today’s ruling holding R.T. Rybak accountable for his deliberate attempt to circumvent our state’s campaign finance laws is to be commended,” said state GOP chairman Tony Sutton in a statement. “Rybak campaigned for governor across Minnesota for months without lawfully establishing a campaign committee and recording his expenditures. It appears that the sole purpose of his campaign for mayor was to provide a slush fund for gubernatorial ambitions.”

Rybak’s campaign countered with its own statement taking issue with the board’s findings. “Mayor R.T. Rybak has been honest and forthcoming regarding his consideration of a run for governor, and our campaign has been careful to not raise contributions or make expenditures for the purpose of influencing a campaign for governor until a formal decision was made,” it said. “The Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board has found that certain expenses incurred by the mayor’s campaign should be counted as expenses related to a governor’s campaign. Although we disagree with the basis, we will accept the board’s finding and take action to account for these expenses and reimburse the mayor’s campaign for them.”

Rybak’s flirtation with a gubernatorial run failed to have any negative repercussions on Tuesday’s mayoral contest. He romped to a third term with more than 70 percent of the vote. But will the campaign finance board’s ruling have any detrimental impact on his political viability for 2010?

David Schultz, a political science and law professor at Hamline University, doesn’t believe it will prove significant. “Does he have a scarlet A on his forehead? I doubt it,” Schultz says. “Except for some insiders most people aren’t going to care about this issue.”

Indeed, candidates have been rebuked by the campaign finance board in the past for infractions and not suffered electoral consequences. In 2002, for instance, then-state Rep. Tim Pawlenty’s gubernatorial campaign was fined $100,000 for improperly coordinating efforts with the Minnesota GOP. Of course, he’s now serving his second term in the state’s top office and eyeing a national presidential bid.

Schultz does believe, however, that the Rybak snafu highlights the need for changes to the state’s campaign finance laws in order to increase transparency and accountability. In particular, he thinks there should be more frequent disclosure requirements for political contributions and expedited hearings on potential violations of campaign statutes.

“We still have this incredible opaqueness and lack of transparency in terms of our campaigns,” Schultz says. “This is the kind of thing that should have been caught, policed and dealt with months ago.”

He notes that the mayoral contest was already decided by the time the campaign finance board ruling was issued, meaning voters weren’t aware of the violation when they cast their ballots. “Maybe this might have made a difference to some people in the mayor’s race,” Schultz says. “I don’t know if it would have put him under 50 percent, but it might have made a difference.”

The “Draft Bob Fletcher for MN Governor in 2010″ Facebook page currently has 334 friends. The “DraftFletcher” Twitter feed has attracted 44 followers.

But unlike recent campaigns to entice R.T. Rybak and John Choi into political contests, the sincerity of the effort to woo Ramsey County’s top cop seems a bit questionable.

The most recent tweet, for instance, declares Fletcher “the only candidate who is honest about their corruption!” The Facebook page lists his title at the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office as “supreme leader.” Then there are the pictures of the young woman being blasted in the face with pepper spray by a cop during last year’s Republican National Convention.

Not exactly the image most politicians seek to convey.

It’s unclear who’s behind the mock campaign. An email to the Facebook account received no immediate response.

But Fletcher earned the enduring enmity of protesters for his department’s heavy-handed tactics leading up to the Republican National Convention. More recently he’s been criticized for failing to provide proper oversight of the beleaguered (and now defunct) Metro Gang Strike Force.

In 2003, Pawlenty submitted a proposed general fund budget of $28.1 billion — or $2.8 billion more than the revenues received during the previous biennium. Two years later the governor offered up a $29.8 billion budgetary blueprint, roughly $1 billion more than the state took in during the previous budget cycle.

The pattern continued in Pawlenty’s second term. In 2007, he proposed a $34.4 billion general fund allotment, $2.2 billion more than the state’s cash inflow during the previous biennium. Finally in January of this year, the governor submitted a $33.6 billion budget, $1.4 billion more than revenues during the prior two-year cycle.

In total, Pawlenty’s budget proposals for the eight-year span would have exceeded revenues by $7.4 billion. In other words, when Pawlenty actually had the opportunity to adhere to the strict fiscal stringency that he’s now advocating he chose not to do so.

Pawlenty unveiled the proposal at a state Capitol press conference Thursday morning.

Under his plan, the state’s general fund budget would be limited to the amount of revenue collected in the previous two-year cycle. The two-term Republican governor argued that such a stringent cap on spending is necessary because legislators have proven unable to contain spending. Since 1960, he pointed out, general fund budgets have increased by an average of 21 percent every two years.

“That is an amazing, startling, frightening number,” Pawlenty said. “It is unsustainable going forward.”

Such an amendment would need to be passed by the legislature and then approved by voters. Pawlenty wants the proposal to be on the ballot next year.

But it is unlikely to get a favorable reception from Democrats, who control both legislative bodies with substantial majorities. Pawlenty acknowledged that.

“I suspect they won’t like it,” he said of his DFL counterparts. “Anything that limits spending growth they won’t like.”

Democratic leaders insisted that they will give the proposal serious consideration. “I’m intrigued at learning more about it,” said Tom Bakk, chair of the Senate Taxes Committee and a candidate to take over Pawlenty’s job in 2011. “This will require some very thoughtful consideration.”

But Democrats also pointed out that Pawlenty has never proposed a budget that would have fit within the fiscal strictures he hopes to set for future administrations. In the current biennium, for instance, Pawlenty initially proposed a $34.4 billion general fund budget — more than $2 billion over revenue collections for the prior two years. In addition, the state is currently facing a $5–7 billion budget deficit.

“We’ve got a $5–7 billion iceberg in front of us and I think it would have been better if he would have proposed something of this significance earlier in his term,” said Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller. “But let’s give it some thought now, on his way out the door.”

Indeed, Pawlenty is not running for re-election next year and is clearly eyeing a 2012 presidential bid. Burnishing his credentials as a fiscal conservative could help with that cause — even if it does nothing to solve Minnesota’s budget problems.

Many conservative commentators, from the Wall Street Journal editorial board to Americans for Tax Reform, hailed Pawlenty in June for unilaterally slashing $2.7 billion from Minnesota’s budget over Democratic protests.

The DFL party was quick to characterize Pawlenty’s proposed amendment as another ploy to bolster his political ambitions.

“If a budget cap is such a good idea, why did Gov. Pawlenty wait until he was nearly out the door before proposing it?” asked Brian Melendez, chairman of the DFL party, in a press release. “The answer is simple: so that he wouldn’t actually have to govern under it, because he has no plans to follow through with what is really just a political stunt aimed at boosting his national notoriety.”

Cillizza knocks Pawlenty for clumsily wading into the congressional race in upstate New York that was ultimately won by Democrat Bill Owens. He also criticizes the Republican governor for an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show during which he suggested that U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine might not be sufficiently down with GOP orthodoxy to remain a member in good standing of the party. The upshot of these two events, according to Cillizza: Pawlenty appears to be too transparently pandering to conservative activists.

Even so, The Fix scribe is not willing to write off Pawlenty’s 2012 ambitions. “Pawlenty still has more than two years to grow into the role he is running for,” Cillizza notes. “And, now is the time to make mistakes — when only a few super-nerdy political junkies (yours truly very much included) and a handful of party activists are paying close attention.”

Pawlenty’s figures lagged well behind those of other potential GOP contenders. Mike Huckabee was deemed worthy of serious consideration by 71 percent of Republicans, while Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney were judged credible contenders by 65 percent of GOP respondents. Among all of those surveyed, just 25 percent deemed Pawlenty qualified to be president, while twice as many held the opposite view.

The Gallup survey polled 1,021 adults across the country. It had a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It’s the third recent poll to indicate that Pawlenty has considerable work to do if he intends to make a credible bid for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Earlier today, though, Politics in Minnesota reported that Brod is definitely out of the contest and speculated that she might throw her support behind state Rep. Tom Emmer.

So, case closed? Apparently not. Responding to inquiries about the PiM report on Twitter, Brod insisted that she’s made no decisions about 2010.

“I have not ruled myself in or out and have made no endorsements,” she wrote. “I expect the GOP field to expand.”

City Council incumbents Don Samuels (Ward 5) and Barb Johnson (Ward 4)

So much for election night drama in Minneapolis. Despite more than 50 candidates vying for 13 posts on the Minneapolis City Council, only two contests resulted in the top vote-getter failing to surpass the 50 percent threshold required for victory under the new instant-runoff voting (IRV) system. Incumbents Barb Johnson and Don Samuels each easily out-polled their challengers but failed to earn first-choice support from more than half of voters on Tuesday.

This means that election officials will now have to go through the laborious process of hand-counting voters’ second and third choices to determine who will ultimately be declared the winner. But results posted at the Secretary of State’s Office suggest Samuels and Johnson are likely to prevail when all the electoral dust settles.

Let’s consider the math. Johnson, the city council president and four-term incumbent, was the top choice of 47 percent of voters in Ward Four. Among her trio of challengers, Troy Parker finished a distant second with support from 28 percent of voters. Johnson also received 23 percent of second-place votes and 21 percent of third-place votes. The upshot: She appears a lock for re-election.

Four years ago, Johnson faced no electoral opposition. But this year she narrowly survived a battle with Parker for the DFL endorsement and was hit by last-minute revelations about dubious campaign expenditures. Even so, she appears headed for a fifth term.

Samuels’ position appears only slightly more tenuous. The Ward Five incumbent was also the top choice of 47 percent of voters. Running second was a familiar foe: former city council member Natalie Johnson Lee, with first-choice support from 30 percent of voters. Three other challengers trailed well behind.

But Johnson Lee, who lost to Samuels four years ago, doubled up the incumbent on second-place votes, 34 to 16 percent. She also narrowly topped him for third-place ballots with support from 22 percent of voters. While this means the race will undoubtedly tighten as the other candidates are dropped and second- and third-choice votes are added, it seems likely that Samuels will ultimately reach the 50-percent threshold.

The incumbent says he has not heard from any of his challengers. But he’s not surprised by the lack of congratulatory calls considering the novel voting calculations and the lingering uncertainty about the outcome.

“The promise of ranked-choice voting is that the very unlikely is likely to happen,” Samuels says. “There’s a thread of hope out there no matter how thin.”

But for all the electoral activity and hand-wringing over the potential implications of the new voting system, the end result is this: every incumbent who ran for re-election appears likely to prevail.

In the waning days of the campaign, the No Bad Ballots Committee filed a pair of grievances with the Office of Administrative Hearings charging that IRV supporters were using false claims to bolster their electoral prospects. Specifically, the group took issue with claims that the DFL party, the St. Paul League of Women Voters and President Obama, among others, supported the adoption of instant-runoff voting.

“They knew they were going to lose if they didn’t deceive the voters of St. Paul,” says Chuck Repke, co-chair of the No Bad Ballots Committee.

The St. Paul Better Ballots Campaign, which spearheaded the IRV campaign, has denied any wrongdoing. The ballot measure, which asked voters if they wanted to adopt instant-runoff voting for municipal elections, passed by a 52-48 percent margin. Minneapolis utilized the new voting system, whereby voters rank candidates in order of preference, for the first time on Tuesday and experienced few difficulties.

A phone hearing on the grievances is set for 4 p.m. today. An administrative law judge will determine if there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to proceed to a formal hearing. Repke wants the result of the ballot measure tossed out.

“I think we win this in court quite easily,” he says.

Will Rossbach and Diana Longrie

Will Rossbach avenged his electoral defeat from four years ago, ousting Maplewood Mayor Diana Longrie by a 51-39 percent margin on Tuesday. In the previous campaign, Longrie prevailed with 53 percent of the vote.

Rossbach will likely have a friendly city council to work with over the next four years. Kathleen Juenemann and James Llanas, both of whom are viewed as Rossbach allies, won spots on the municipal body. They received support from 27 and 25 percent of voters respectively. Dave Hafner was a close third with 23 percent of the vote.

Maplewood’s notoriously acrimonious and odd politics were once again evident this campaign season. Llanas was the target of fliers that attempted to raise questions about his sexuality and ethnicity. Write-in campaigns by Ken Smart and DelRay Rokke employed some creative logic in suggesting which votes should be counted in their columns. But apparently such electoral ploys didn’t resonate with voters this year.